Some children playing hide-and-seek in the forest found it first—a rusted, greenish fifty-five-gallon metal drum knocked sideways on a pile of dead leaves near a skinny birch tree. The children ran around the old drum and kicked its sealed lid, just for fun, until the lid came loose and a black trash bag spilled out. That spooked the children, and they scurried away.
A few days later, on November 10, 1985, a hunter roamed the same woods in New Hampshire’s Bear Brook State Park, a heavily forested preserve teeming with deer, moose, turkey, and, predictably, black bears, and strewn with campgrounds, cabins, stone cookeries, hiking trails, and vast lonely stretches along pine-covered valleys and ridges. The hunter came across the rusted, kicked-over metal drum and its spilled contents. He looked at the black trash bag and saw something so disturbing it would take him ten years before he was able to hunt in those same woods again.
Sticking out of a tear in the trash bag was a human foot.
The hunter alerted police, and the gruesome discovery was retrieved. Medical examiners in New Hampshire determined what was in the trash bag: the dismembered and badly decomposing remains of not just one but two humans, a woman and a young girl. They had been dismembered, wrapped in plastic, and tied with electrical tape. The best guess was that the two females had been murdered several years earlier.
Unfortunately, the bodies were so badly degraded that identifying the victims seemed all but impossible. After months of investigation, the remains were released for burial and interred in a steel casket to better preserve them should they ever need to be exhumed. The casket was buried beneath a donated gravestone that read:
Here lies the mortal remains known only to God of a woman age 23–33 and a girl child age 8–10. Their slain bodies were found on November 10, 1985 in Bear Brook State Park. May their souls find peace in God’s loving care.
Fifteen years passed, and the double murders remained unsolved.
Then, in 2000, New Hampshire State Police sergeant John Cody, assigned to the long-cold case, decided to recanvass the crime scene in the endless woods of Bear Brook Park.
There he made another shocking discovery.
Just a hundred or so yards from where the hunter had found the first metal drum in 1985, Sergeant Cody found a second rusted drum.
When investigators opened this one, they found the decomposed remains of two more victims—both young girls—wrapped in plastic and tied with electrical tape.
Now there were four unidentified murder victims, three of them children, and the long-cold case assumed a new urgency. A double homicide was now a quadruple murder, and a feeling of unease settled over Allenstown, a small, scenic hamlet of some forty-seven hundred people and twenty square acres, half of which were consumed by the deep bogs and dense forests of Bear Brook Park.
Autosomal DNA extracted from the bones and tissue from each of the four victims was irreparably contaminated by bacterial DNA and could not produce a sample that would allow for identification of the bodies. But investigators were able to obtain mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which allowed them to conclude that the woman and two of the children were maternally related. The third child was not maternally related and remained a complete mystery.
Despite this startling new development, the case went cold again.
Another fifteen years would pass before Junel Davidsen, as well as Ashley Rodriguez and Carol Schweitzer at NCMEC, made the connection between Allenstown and Manchester. Their curiosity reenergized the investigation into the murders.
By then, investigators knew a little more about Bob Evans/Gordon Jensen, the man who was Denise Beaudin’s live-in boyfriend in 1981—and who had abducted Denise’s daughter, Lisa Jensen, after Denise disappeared.
Born in Colorado in 1943 one day before Christmas Eve, Evans dropped out of high school in Arizona to join the U.S. Navy, where he trained as an electrician. He was married in 1969 and had a son and three daughters, but his wife took the children and left him shortly after giving birth to their fourth child. She claimed that she came home from the hospital after the birth to discover cigarette burns on her son’s buttocks—the same atrocity Bob Evans later inflicted on Lisa Jensen. Many years later, when police eventually questioned Bob Evans’s son, he remembered his father burning him with cigarettes and described Evans as having “dead man’s” eyes.
Following his divorce in 1978, Evans relocated across the country to Manchester, New Hampshire. There he was arrested in 1980 for writing bad checks and stealing electricity by diverting an electrical current. Just one year later, in 1981, Evans disappeared from Manchester, along with his new girlfriend, Denise Beaudin, and Denise’s daughter, Lisa.
After that Bob Evans assumed the alias Curtis Kimball and was arrested for drunk driving—and endangering young Lisa, who was in the car with him—in Cypress, California, in 1985. Evans/Kimball skipped town before he could be indicted and assumed yet another identity: Gordon Jensen. It was as Gordon Jensen that he abandoned Lisa after their stay at the Santa Cruz Ranch RV Resort in 1986, but once again he eluded capture, disappeared, and changed his name. Finally, as Gerry Mockerman, he was arrested in 1988 on suspicion of stealing a car, and police unraveled his many false identities. It was the crime of abandoning Lisa in 1986 that finally landed him in prison—but not for long,
Evans/Kimball/Jensen/Mockerman served only two years in prison for abandoning Lisa, and when he was released he began a new life in Richmond, California. For years, whatever fresh criminal exploits he perpetrated remained under the radar. In 2001, he married Eunsoon Jun, a chemist in her early forties, in a ceremony in the backyard of her home, where they both lived. It was not an official marriage.
By then, Bob Evans had a new alias—he was now Larry Vanner. And, as Vanner, he had a new mysterious tragedy to explain: the disappearance of his wife just a few months after the informal wedding ceremony.
Vanner told a friend of Eunsoon Jun’s that she had left town on her own, but the friend was suspicious. She told police that Eunsoon would never leave without first saying goodbye. That simply was not her way. The friend kept pushing police until they sent officers to Eunsoon’s Richmond home to look around. In a basement area they found something strange:
Two hundred and fifty pounds of loose kitty litter in a big pile.
Police dug through the mounds of litter, pulling away dusty handfuls at a time, until they came upon the horror: a mummified and dismembered body wrapped in plastic and electrical tape.
These were the remains of Eunsoon Jun, killed, apparently, with a sledgehammer.
Police brought Vanner in for questioning. He volunteered to be fingerprinted, believing, perhaps, that it would take time for his prints to be processed—time he could use to get himself released from custody and disappear yet again. But since his last brush with the law years earlier, fingerprinting technology had vastly improved, and Vanner’s prints, processed in real time, immediately connected him to crimes that he had committed under two aliases: Bob Evans and Gordon Jensen.
That was enough for police to arrest Vanner and, after further investigation, charge him with second-degree murder for the killing of Eunsoon Jun. Vanner pleaded not guilty, but at a pretrial hearing he surprised prosecutors by suddenly changing his plea to no contest. Captain Roxane Gruenheid of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, the officer who started the investigation into Lisa Jensen’s identity, believed Vanner changed his plea because he overheard her in court mentioning his possible connection to Lisa’s case.
“I think…he believed if he pled guilty,” Gruenheid explained to a reporter, “I would stop investigating that aspect of his past.”
Authorities sentenced Vanner to fifteen years to life in prison. He served seven of those years at the High Desert Prison in Susanville, California, and in 2010 he died there, of natural causes.
A long and heinous criminal record, it seemed, had finally logged its last crime.
But had it?
